Oh, imagine the fun you’ll have merging disparate IT departments located at 21 sites around the globe into one centralized group. Can you see it? Let’s see – there are the standards to adopt so everyone’s on the same page. There’s the flow charts and the org charts that have to get created for all the various projects. Communication. Expectations. Processes. Not to mention the best practices throughout the company for the infrastructure. Headache?

Well, this was the exact situation that The RUAG Group faced recently. The Ruag Group is an international aerospace and defense technology company with production sites in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Hungary and the United States. RUAG employs around 7,800 employees in total, 5,000 of whom are in Switzerland. RUAG Services (which handles IT for the Ruag Group) needed to merge its IT departments in 21 sites into one centralized group. Not only that, it needed to protect all its critical data on the infrastructure’s Oracle databases and unite local backup processes for data protection and disaster recovery.

When companies consolidate their IT environments, it can be a nightmare to guarantee the the availability of their Oracle databases as they migrate to converged infrastructures. Because customers want to protect the critical data being managed by Oracle, knowing the best practices and following clear procedures can help reduce headaches, as we note in this DCIG report.

For Ruag, following a merging of the IT departments, the company wanted to unite its local backup processes with no impact to users. The company needed to put in place a backup and recovery process that required little staff power along with safeguards, so that its varied operating systems, storage systems and application servers were protected during every phase of the consolidation experience. Of particular concern was the Oracle databases.

As Ruag moved through the process, it set its requirements, communicated with staff, and detailed the process. As Sven Dietrich, CC Infrastructure Manager, RUAG Services notes, “The most important requirement for our backup solution was centralized management on one type of hardware, with support for all our operating systems and storage solutions. We also wanted the solution to perform incremental backups to disk.” This priority allowed the company to deliver flexible recovery options that minimize impact on business during consolidation and minimized IT training and expertise requirements by eliminating multiple, disparate backup processes, which were cumbersome.

Shortly thereafter Ruag began seeing results for the company that included

Decreased IT backup workload by 93%

Reduced recovery time by 50%

Saved 30% in generated storage

By putting into place the best practices that guarantee availability of their Oracle databases and other critical infrastructure needs, Ruag can say its sitting pretty. Well, at least the headaches are gone!

How about you? Did you have a consolidation or a business merger? If so, what best practices did you put in place during the change, especially to protect your Oracle databases?